
Format: Hardback
Pages: 480
ISBN: 9780866983952
Pub Date: May 2008
Imprint: Medieval and Renaissance Texts Society
Price:
£12.95
RRP: £57.00
In stock
Description:
Poets in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age constantly explored the discourse of love, and nothing seems to have mattered more than love in the world of the courts. But what was it all about, and what did love mean? This book argues that love then was much more than the simple exploration of an emotion. Instead, the discourse examined here from many interdisciplinary perspectives served as a springboard for fundamental epistemological investigations into the meaning of human life in erotic, spiritual, and philosophical terms. Words of love implied, in a chiasmic manner, love of words, and in this sense the discourse of love aimed for the development of communication, ethics, morality, spirituality, and the entire value system of courtly society far into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To love meant to talk about love, and this experience led to the formation of the individual, social relations, connections to the Godhead, hence the realization of the spiritual dimension of human existence through love, happiness, joy, harmony, and ultimately the transformational magic of language.